Gary Hume

Mum

Press Release

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Gary Hume: Mum, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The show features thirteen recent paintings, each on aluminum or paper. This is Hume’s first exhibition of new work in New York in four years.

This body of work focuses on a range of subjects, but at its core is a suite of highly personal paintings about memory and loss. Hume’s mother is 86 years old and suffers from dementia. And while the ostensible subjects of many of the new paintings are flowers, their titles — Mourning, Spent, Blind — reflect Hume’s thoughts of her. Mum on the Couch (2017), a more direct portrait, depicts the artist’s aging mother in her current condition, a poignant contrast to the vibrant woman of her son’s memories.

In addition to Hume’s signature aluminum panels, he recently began painting on large sheets of paper. His preferred paint, a highly reflective household gloss, creates textures and reflections on the paper that become an integral part of the work. As Alexander Nagel writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Apparitions of shifting light and shade playing over the surface, we are always part of their subject matter.”

The catalogue, featuring large-scale color reproductions of over thirty paintings, has been published in conjunction with Sprüth Magers, London.

Gary Hume (b. 1962) lives and works in London and Accord, New York. He has been represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery since 1991. He represented Britain at the São Paulo Biennial in 1996 and the Venice Biennale in 1999. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and most recently in 2013 at Tate Britain in London.

Gary Hume: Mum is on view at 522 West 22nd Street from November 4 to December 22, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.